So, because you all enjoyed that list so much, and because I apparently have a death wish, it’s time for another: The Top 10 Most Overrated Actors/Actresses of All Time.

Unlike last time, I will claim that these are objective facts, not subjective opinions, so that all my critics may have full liberty to attack me (To those same critics who claimed last time that I phrased my opinions in an “objective” manner, this is called being facetious. That means I’m kidding. Also, seriously? That was your criticism?).

Here are my criteria: are they considered great actors/actresses? If not, they can’t make the list (sorry, Rob Schneider). Are they actually great actors? If so, they can’t make the list (sorry, Laurence Olivier). Only those who are considered great actors but are not, in fact, great actors can make this list. Even then, I’m not claiming that these are bad actors unless I explicitly say that I am.

So, here we go. In the words of Han Solo, I’ve got a bad feeling about this …

10. George Clooney: Not a great actor. Not a good actor. Not really an actor. If you’ve ever seen a movie with Clooney where you didn’t say to yourself, “Hey, I’m watching George Clooney” every thirty seconds or so, you haven’t seen a George Clooney movie. You’re mixing him up with Kate Winslet. He’s a D actor. Dull in “Michael Clayton.” Dreary in “Up In The Air.” Dreadful in “Syriana.” Dismal in “Batman and Robin.” He’s not a low-rent Cary Grant. He’s an affordable-housing Robert Wagner.

9. Dustin Hoffman: He turned in some tremendous performances in his early days (most notably “Papillon,” “Kramer vs. Kramer,” and “Tootsie”), then became a caricature of himself. He has not done anything worthwhile since “Tootsie,” in fact. Even in his better performances, he is a bit too mannered for my taste, perhaps an effect of his method acting. Laurence Olivier thought the same thing. When they were working on “Marathon Man” together, Hoffman showed up on set after having not slept for several days in order to get “in character.” Olivier took one look at him and said, “Dear boy, it’s called acting.”

8. Spencer Tracy: He’s immensely likable on screen, but he’s not a great actor by any stretch of the imagination. Light comedy is his forte (watch the original “Father of the Bride” or “Adam’s Rib”), but he’s too stolid in heavy drama like “Bad Day at Black Rock.” He’s always Spencer Tracy, no matter what he’s in. That’s more a characteristic of older actors who were movie stars rather than actors (see John Wayne, Cary Grant, Clark Gable, etc.), but those actors are rarely listed among the best of all time. Tracy routinely is.

7. Katharine Hepburn: Overwrought, overhyped, and overblown. Hepburn is the same in virtually all of her films, save “The Rainmaker,” “Long Day’s Journey Into Night,” and “On Golden Pond.” She tends to chew the scenery, and she never inhabits a part; she insists that the part inhabits her. Her films with Tracy are just as formulaic as Hope and Crosby (and no one ever called Hope and Crosby great actors). Many critics loved her because she wasn’t afraid to lose her femininity at the door, but that made her a hard actress to love onscreen.

6. Gregory Peck: Atticus Finch is supposed to have a Southern accent. Joseph Mengele is supposed to have a German accent. And characters are supposed to be different from each other. Philip Green in “Gentleman’s Agreement” is not supposed to be the same character as Joe Bradley in “Roman Holiday” or Captain Ahab in “Moby Dick.” Peck could not play pathos, could not play vulnerability, and could not play real anger. Like Tracy, the best word to describe him would be stolid.

5. Leonardo DiCaprio: He shows flashes of brilliance, then subsumes them in gigantic waves of mannerisms. When he burst onto the scene with “Titanic,” I thought he was going to be one of the great ones – for someone that age to turn in a performance that good in a movie that bad is worth noting. But watch him in “Gangs of New York,” and you find yourself laughing out loud at the notion that this whiny nobody is supposed to be the tough guy. Watch him in “The Man in the Iron Mask,” and he can’t even decide whether to pronounce Athos as “Aaathos” or “Aye-thos.” Watch him in “The Departed” – well, don’t bother to watch him in “The Departed.” Somebody has been whispering in his ear that great acting is about being showy. It isn’t. It’s about being subtle. We can only hope he heeds that warning before he ends up like Dustin Hoffman.

4. Bill Murray: Great in comedy (see “Tootsie” and “Groundhog Day”), laughably awful in everything else. He turned in what may be the single worst performance in the history of film in the remake of “The Razor’s Edge.” It is a wonder that the director of that film did not somehow mix up Murray and a block of wood during the shoot. It is unthinkable that he was nominated for an Academy Award for the most boring movie of all time, “Lost In Translation;” sitting around mumbling does not make for great acting. Here’s the thing about emotion on film; we should actually see it. I understand the idea of allowing things to simmer beneath the surface. But that doesn’t mean your performance style should invariably mirror a Tiki mask.

3. Tom Hanks: Bill Murray with a touch more emotion, Robin Williams with a touch less. Light comedy is fine (“Big”), everything else borders on the maudlin. “Castaway” is unintentionally hilarious (rent it and do bits on it), he’s a hole in the screen in “Saving Private Ryan,” and his performance in “Forrest Gump” is one-note. He’s not a bad actor, but he’s certainly not a great one. He is a great producer, though – for “Band of Brothers” alone, he should be enshrined among the best.

2. Meryl Streep: Undoubtedly I will be hung by my toenails for this pick. She is a marvel technically, but she’s always cold. I can’t think of a single film in which she has reached me emotionally. I always get the feeling while watching her movies that I’m watching a documentary about acting for a master class; I never get the feeling that her characters are real. On this one, I agree with Katharine Hepburn, who couldn’t stand Streep’s acting: “Click, click, click,” she once said, talking about the gears you can see turning inside Streep’s head.

1. Jack Nicholson: He sucks in everything. It’s that simple. Anyone who considers him a great actor ought to get his/her head examined. I understand that he’s a hero to the ‘60s generation because he did drugs and got murdered for psychedelic “freedom” in “Easy Rider.” That doesn’t excuse him for cursing film with his presence for the next forty years. He has no versatility whatsoever. He is always a cynical/menacing fellow with “reserves of depth” (unless he has no “reserves of depth”). He is the worst case of miscasting in movie history in “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” (McMurphy is supposed to be a huge red-headed Irishman, not a 5’10” counterculture weasel), a glaring problem in a film that is otherwise impeccably cast (Brad Dourif as Billy is one of the great overlooked performances in the annals of film). Nicholson over Peter Fonda in “1997″ is a cosmic injustice. He is boring, predictable, and what’s more, he’s pretentious and annoying. 12 Oscar nominations for this hack testifies to the idiocy of the Baby Boomer generation that made him famous.

“I thought you wuh dead!”

Symbolically I had, indeed, died to the business of celebrity and fame. It frightened me. Sickened me, actually. Made me commit a kind of career suicide. Because my career blip had fallen off Katharine Hepburn’s radar screen, I had become dead to her.

I’m sure, though, if I had ever called again, it would be her, Hepburn and not her secretary, picking up the phone in the East Side Manhattan brownstone she owned. This particular clip from “Glass Menagerie” says it all.

“Then go to the moon, you selfish dreamah!!!”

That is Hepburn rocketing the whole, profoundly ignorant, lifeless world to an equally banal and distantly barren planet. The faint echo placed upon Miss H’s cry of “dreamah” is particularly resonant now, insofar as the symbolic son that Kate was exhorting was, in real life, the playwright Tennessee Williams whom I also knew. About whom I will write in a future Big Hollywood post.

I came to know both Ms. Hepburn and Tennessee because of “Glass Menagerie.” My friendship with Tennessee lasted much longer than the volatile one I’d briefly shared with Hepburn.

Why?

Both Tennessee and I were destined to wander for brief while among the walking wounded.

Volatile is actually an insufficient adjective for Katherine Hepburn. She didn’t live so much as burn. Flame like an exploding planet: the very definition of a Star! She was fire itself. When she didn’t feel the fire within her? She would go and lie down till a good nap brought the fire back.

As in this photo, one couldn’t always anticipate in which direction that inner gaze would take us: exclamations of ecstasy or anger? Therein lies the secret of great acting: don’t let the audience know what is coming next. Never telegraph where you are going.

She was inevitably one of the sexiest women I’ve ever met.

Why inevitably?

Once she shared the liberation of her thoughts, the limitless directions her mind could go in? All seemed possible around her. Quite inspiring on all levels. This photo captures exactly the pose she was in when I first laid eyes on her at the Warwick Hotel. She was gazing out the window but not at Manhattan.

Some corner of her magnificent history on earth was floating by her inner eye. Our following meeting was on April 5th, 1973.

“I hear you have a birthday, today!”

Yes, I said.

“Do you know who else was born on April 5th?”

No, I said.

“Spensah!!”

Well, I thought, gee, gosh … and by gum … what can I possibly say to that? When you are in the presence of self-evident greatness remembering greatness, your heart doesn’t just sink. It seems to disappear, along with your courage, not to mention the once eloquent mobility of your tongue.

It was the Irish thing that fascinated Hepburn. Her love for Irish men was unashamedly brazen. John Ford to Tracy to O’Toole. As I said, and in her value system, Hepburn thought I was dead!

Since acting only became a part of my life as a writer and musician as well, I think she might cut me a bit of slack now. Then again, acting and becoming an indelibly memorable star and performer seemed her singular and most eternal obsession. Stardom seemed a goal in the Hepburn soul before her specter had even arrived on earth.

To paraphrase what has been said about Bette Davis in The Letter: “Katharine Hepburn rips it open!”

The ghost of Laurette Taylor will hang over any actress’s performance as “The Glass Menagerie’s” Amanda Wingfield. Audience members who had seen Taylor’s Amanda have spoken with awe about the reality of it, how there seemed to be no acting involved. Because the memory of Taylor and her own particular personality has so dominated the history of the role, Hepburn, who is not absent minded or dizzy about anything in life as Taylor’s Amanda Wingfield was, seemed to many critics “miscast.” What should have brought Hepburn at least an Emmy Award Nomination brought her nothing but neglect. Hepburn, however, knew the risk she was taking and, being a born Shakespearean “Kate,” she took it.

One thing about the theater. If you are there watching greatness, you own that experience among a select few by comparison to the gigantic audiences of film and television. Sadly, the recording of Laurence Olivier’s “Othello” carries nothing of the power I experienced when I saw him perform it live in London. No one can take that memory away from me. Not even a film that flattened almost everything he did or said as Othello.

The same is true of my life-altering adoration of Paul Scofield’s Don Adriano de Armado in “Love’s Labor’s Lost.” Those who did see that miracle own the spiritual privilege of a billionaire. Likewise, simply sitting with the great Hepburn over lunch or between breaks in rehearsal? A young man is never quite the same after such an experience. Nor does he want to be.

I had been “Hepburned!”

The fire of that woman, as I recall it, still brings tears to my eyes. In the end, the only playwright I consider worthy of Hepburn’s soul is Shakespeare. When asked by Barbra Streisand why Hepburn seemed so insulted by the singer’s question, “Have you ever done Shakespeare before?”

I replied, “That would be like asking you, Ms. Streisand, if you sing.”

As the great literary critic, Harold Bloom declared, “Shakespeare invented us!” Hepburn was everything Shakespeare was looking for in a human being, male or female. Shakespeare didn’t invent her. God did. Shakespeare might have had to play hurry and catch up with Hepburn.

Only an exceptional actress could ever pull that off.

Unadulterated goodness is, I feel, the hardest and most challenging thing for any actor or actress to play. No one really believes you can be that sainted, least of all yourself.

Having worked with a few of the female greats, Katherine Hepburn and Meryl Streep, and met a few others such as Bette Davis, I found the unadulterated health and blistering sanity of Rosamund Pike’s Miriam in “Barney’s Version” most astounding.

Everyone in the audience just has to fall in love with her during our first glimpse of this vision of her Miriam’s low key, Canadian nobility.

We actually drop off a cliff in the same way alcoholic, eternally Boychick Barney does. She is, of course, strikingly beautiful but eloquently frank and irresistibly unselfconscious. How does Barney win her and keep her for as long as he does? That is the major flaw in the script.
Barney is not who he appears to be, based, as I’ve learned, on the original novel’s author, the renowned Canadian writer Mordecai Richler. Barney has received none of the world’s weighty homage as Richler has. Barney is a successful producer of lightweight television fare. Rosamund Pike’s Miriam was not only not born yesterday but is insightfully generous in her first encounter with Barney and every appearance following that.

Perhaps Mr. Richler’s startling humility may well have inspired Barney’s disturbingly flawed humanity. It is perhaps the novelist’s self-image by comparison to his perfect wife, the very woman Pike says she based her performance on. However, we find it hard to believe not Pike and her performance but the screenplay’s story-telling.

However, Pike’s commitment to the script itself and the powerful simplicity of her performance carries you along through the arduous and nakedly revealing saga of Barney Panofsky and his oddly matched, third and longest marriage. You believe she actually feels fated to marry, live with and endure Boychick Barney.

Ultimately “Barney’s Version” is a wonderfully challenging journey for anyone to experience and, in the end, quite remarkable for the feelings it evokes. Paul Giamatti plays Barney Panofsky with the same abandon he performed America’s firey John Adams with. His refusal to pander for audience sympathy takes us on a much richer adventure than I, for one, was prepared for.

I don’t think I’ve ever experienced a film quite like it. Why?

Rarely is a whole man shown to us in almost any story-telling format, whether novel, theater or film. Our knowledge of Barney in the end is almost embarrassingly complete. We are a bit shocked that we could come to know another human being that well in so short a time. Thanks to Richler’s selfless honesty and Giamatti’s courage, we do.

With the oft-repeated question, “What is she doing with a guy like that?” hammering at us so frequently, we constantly doubt the credibility of this intensely realistic, beautifully performed and impressively directed film.

By a very odd and left-field way of comparison, the musical “Nine,” based on Federico Fellini’s very autobiographical “8 1/2,” carries no suspension of disbelief, not only because of its form and style as a musical, but the errant ways and seeming insanities of not a decent but a great film director. His foibles are almost de rigeur. What else could you expect from genius?

But Barney as a genius?!

Barney’s greatest achievement in life was finding and marrying Miriam. That is, in turn, Mordecai Richler’s selfless homage to his own wife.

That timeless gift to Mrs. Richler almost absolves whatever drunken excesses the author might have wandered into as a Barney, rendering them and the film a surprisingly Catholic confession with the audience as priest.

Of course we forgive him. He’s not only Barney. He’s Mordecai Richler!

Big Peace: Professor Kengor, Hollywood is celebrating its Academy Awards, a look back at great actors and actresses and films.

Kengor: For me, it’s a moment to look back at Hollywood’s worst communists, communist sympathizers, Stalinists, and duped liberals and progressives—as well as the good guys (and gals) that fit none of those categories.

Big Peace: Fair enough. This should be fun. Let’s start with communists.

Charlie Chaplin comment, “Thank God for
communism!” will make you see (him) red.

Kengor: How about the Hollywood screenwriters who liberals still insist were innocent lambs? Dalton Trumbo, Communist Party code “Dalt T;” Albert Maltz, party no. 47196; Alvah Bessie, no. 46836; John Howard Lawson, no. 47275. Or, if you turn to page 191 of my book—if you don’t have a copy yet, shame on you—you can view Arthur Miller’s party application. Miller wrote The Crucible, about how Joe McCarthy pursued “liberals” unfairly suspected of being communists—“liberals” like Miller, Trumbo, Maltz, Bessie, Lawson.

Big Peace: As you say in Dupes, Hollywood produced “quite a cast.” Let’s narrow the focus to the Academy Awards.

Kengor: Among films that have canonized communists, Julia (1977) celebrated the scowling Lillian Hellman and her mystery lover/writer, Dashiell Hammett, who we now know was a CPUSA member. Hellman wrote a bitter play called Scoundrel Time, about Joe McCarthy. In Hellman’s universe, it was Joe McCarthy, not Joe Stalin, who was evil. Winning Oscars for Julia were Jason Robards and Vanessa Redgrave. Fittingly, Lillian Hellman was played by Jane Fonda, recently retired from her real-life role as Vietcong go-go girl. “If you would understand what communism was,” Fonda pleaded with a student audience, “you would pray on your knees that we would someday be communist.”

Big Peace: Another film from that period that celebrated American communists was Warren Beatty’s Reds (1981).

Kengor: That film lionized American Bolshevik John Reed. Reed today is buried in the wall of the Kremlin, a structure responsible for upwards of 60-70 million deaths. Maureen Stapleton won an Oscar for her role in that film as “Red” Emma Goldman, a woman so radical that Woodrow Wilson’s Justice Department deported her to Russia.

Big Peace: Which Academy Award winner made the worst statement about communism?

Kengor: I would roll out the red carpet for Charlie Chaplin. “Thank God for communism!” said the silent film star. “They say communism may spread all over the world. I say, so what?” The Daily Worker thrust that comment onto its front page. Communism, of course, did spread around the world, killing 100-140 million. How’s that for a “so what?”

Big Peace: You have several Oscar winners in Dupes whose names were raised as potential communists by a party organizer in Los Angeles who testified under oath to a grand jury and to Congress.

Kengor: The party organizer was John Leech. Most of those he named turned out to be proven party members. Among those who denied Leech’s charges were Jimmy Cagney, who won an Oscar for Yankee Doodle Dandy, Fredric March, who won it twice, and Humphrey Bogart, who won for The African Queen. I think Cagney was at least momentarily interested in the Communist Party.

Big Peace: We talked previously about your fascinating material on Humphrey Bogart, profiled in a feature by Big Hollywood (click here).

Kengor: In the Soviet Comintern Archives on CPUSA, I found a “Bogart” at the Workers School in New York in 1934. With great care, and with all the declassified documents, I consider whether this was Humphrey Bogart. I found no smoking gun, but it’s extremely intriguing.

Big Peace: We do know that Bogart was a dupe.

Kengor: He was a self-admitted dupe, ashamed at how the communist screenwriters lied to him and other celebrities that formed a group called the Committee for the First Amendment. They flew all the way to Washington to defend their “progressive” friends, only to learn that the screenwriters were closet Stalinists. Bogart was enraged, snapping, “You [expletives] sold me out!” Yes, they did. The Reds had no concern for the reputations of these actors.

Other duped liberals who threw their support behind these communists, and won Academy Awards, were Henry Fonda, Gregory Peck, and Judy Garland.

Big Peace: Perhaps the biggest Oscar winner is also one of your biggest dupes: Katharine Hepburn.

Kengor: Yes. One of the sorriest episodes in Hepburn’s illustrious career came when she delivered, in flame red dress, a speech at a May 1947 Progressive Party Rally. The speech was unerringly close to the Soviet line. Why wouldn’t it be? It was written by one of those “liberal” screenwriters: Dalton Trumbo. People’s Daily World reprinted the entire text. Hepburn hit a home-run for the comrades.

Big Peace: Burl Ives won an Oscar for The Big Country (1958). Tell us about Ives.

Kengor: Burl Ives also sang some wonderful Christmas tunes. He was in a folk group called “The Almanacs,” which alternately included Pete Seeger, Woody Guthrie, and (among others) Will Geer—“Grandpa Walton” on The Waltons, a wild left-winger, and Columbia University grad, naturally. Some of these guys joined the party. “The Almanacs” were exploited by the seditious communist front-group, American Peace Mobilization, which appeased Hitler because Hitler signed a non-aggression pact with Stalin. They were the musical entertainment for the mobilization’s signature event in New York in April 1941. Go to pages 142-157 of Dupes, which presents materials from that rally—including Soviet orders to sucker “social justice” pastors, which occurred with tremendous success.

Big Peace: On the plus side, you highlight duped liberals who learned and changed, including in Hollywood. Sticking to Oscar winners, give some examples.

Kengor: If I were giving awards for best converted dupes, male and female—who also won Oscars—they would go to Melvyn Douglas and Olivia de Havilland. Douglas warned his fellow liberals about being duped. Ditto for de Havilland, who we discussed previously (click here). Unlike Katharine Hepburn, de Havilland, who played “Melanie” in Gone With the Wind, refused a pro-Soviet speech written by Trumbo.

Big Peace: Also on the plus side, list some Oscar winners who remained committed anti-communists throughout their career.

Kengor: Top billing goes to John Wayne, of course, who won for True Grit, and declared that Hollywood needed a good communist “de-lousing.” Others: Charlton Heston, Red Buttons, Frank Sinatra, Donna Reed, Loretta Young, Bing Crosby, Ginger Rogers, Jimmy Stewart, Shirley Temple. William Holden, who, with Ronald Reagan (click here), crashed a meeting of Hollywood communists in 1946. Gary Cooper, who won two Oscars, testified before Congress as a friendly witness on communist infiltration in Hollywood. Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert both won awards for It Happened One Night (1934).

Finally, I tip my hat to Haing Ngor, real-life survivor of Pol Pot’s Cambodian holocaust. Ngor won an Oscar for playing “Dith Pran” in The Killing Fields (1984). After all that, he was murdered in California in 1996.

Big Peace: Most of those we’ve noted are deceased. Give us some names of dupes or potential dupes among recent Oscar winners.

Kengor: George Clooney won for Syriana (2005). Mercifully, he didn’t win for Good Night, and Good Luck, another film where anti-communists are the demons. Barbra Streisand won for Funny Girl (1968). Of course, Sean Penn won in 2003 and 2008. Penn fits the theme of my book well, as he’s somewhat of a bridge from Cold War dupes to War on Terror dupes.

Among the non-dupes who won recent Oscars, there’s Jon Voight (Coming Home, 1978). His role in a major film on Pope John Paul II was wonderful, and would never garner modern Hollywood’s approval.

Big Peace: Professor Kengor, thanks for a unique take on the Academy Awards.

Kengor: My pleasure.

Born in 1904, he was the product of a family of actors, and grew up in San Francisco helping his parents learn lines, doing backstage work, and even acting when the occasion demanded. “I was fascinated by all of it,” Stevens said. “The sounds of the theater and the audience, their rapture when a play took over and moved them and held them quietly. . . When the audience was truly moved, it was absolutely quiet. They were in a communion because they were learning the truth about themselves.”

In 1921 his parents moved the family to Los Angeles to find work in the silent movie industry, and for Stevens it was a wonderful change. He leveraged a job his cousin had at Hal Roach studios to begin visiting the lot.

“I was really a kid at the time,” Stevens said, “and I had been interested in photography as a kid, as a hobby. . . I was on a picture for four or five days, had an opportunity to be on a set, and the assistant cameraman kept showing me things. One day I climbed the fence, knowing they needed an assistant cameraman. A couple of days later I was one. The first day or two it was pretty disastrous, but I knew something about photography, and I caught on quick.”

Soon Stevens quit high school — at sixteen, he was a full-time Hollywood cameraman.

Most of the early films he shot were westerns, and he quickly developed an affinity for the genre and the cowboys who brought it to life on screen. “The old western boys were pretty fine fellows,” he said. “It wasn’t that they didn’t kiss the girl and only kissed their horse and didn’t smoke: they were good men and the tradition was such that they wanted to be rugged, responsible. They had an integrity.”

He dreamed of soon directing a western of his own, putting all of these feelings onto the screen, but it was not to be:

Nothing is more pleasant for me than to be on location in the country that I love, in any of our western land­scapes, being out there with a camp outfit and a film company. I had done some work when I was starting in with photography on westerns, and photographing them was the greatest pleasure I had. If I was ever qualified for anything, it would have had to do with making westerns. But as I started working on pictures with people like Katharine Hepburn, I got further away from the thing I really liked to do.

As he developed his skills and through the 1920s and ’30s, slowly graduating from assistant cameraman to cameraman proper and then to director, he found that the western work of his apprenticeship gave way to another genre immensely popular and ubiquitous at the time: comedies. He worked on Laurel and Hardy pictures, and eventually an assortment of (for the most part) rather lighthearted dramas starring the likes of Fred Astaire, James Stewart, Barbara Stanwyck, Katharine Hepburn and Ginger Rogers.

It was a successful career in terms of fame and box office, but it came at a hidden artistic cost that he would only fathom decades later. “I remember a whole period in my life where everything was a gag,” is how he summed up the essential dilemma later in life. “We found ourselves always wanting to play out everything as a joke — a very dangerous thing to do, because we looked at everything frivolously.” What, he wondered, had happened to that sense of communion he had felt when watching audiences under the spell of the plays put on by his parents?

When America finally found itself dragged into the maelstrom of World War II, Stevens’ long, idyllic Hollywood party was over. “I quit the film business to go into the army,” he explained. “I wanted to be in the war — I really didn’t want to make films at that time. . . My agent Charles Feldman told me, ‘You go in this war, it’ll last seven years, and you’re finished as far as films are concerned, if nothing worse happens to you.’ Well, I went in the latter part of 1942. . . ”

The war would become the defining event of his life, utterly changing the way he looked at his art. He commanded a troupe of cameramen who filmed in color throughout Africa and Europe, culminating in the nightmare world they found upon reaching Dachau at the close of the war.

“Beyond descrip­tion,” he said with a shiver later. “Like wandering around in one of Dante’s infernal visions. . . everybody’s pleading for water and laying there, three guys in a bunk, dying. . . we went to the woodpile outside the crematorium, and the woodpile was people.” The George Stevens who once filmed clever comedies in between behind-the-scenes flings with the likes of Katharine Hepburn and Ginger Rogers was no more. “It causes a most profound adjustment in your thinking,” he said. “I don’t suppose I was ever too hilarious again.”

Back in America, the desire to direct again came slowly, and the films became more serious, the work of a auteur surrounded by the ghosts of his past. “I kept feeling I should do a picture about the war — all the other guys had done or were doing pictures about their war experiences, Ford, Huston, Wyler, and so on. And here I was avoiding the subject. Until I found Shane — it was a western, but it was really my war picture. The cattlemen against the ranchers, the gunfighter, the wide-eyed little boy, it was pretty clear to me what it was about.”

Ever since the war, he had become acutely aware of the depiction of violence on screen, and the gaping difference between Hollywood violence and what he had seen at Dachau. “At the time we made this picture there was a great vogue of kids with cowboy hats and cap pistols going bang, bang, bang. . . In the popular movies we saw western guys with guitars, not six-shooters.” Stevens now knew better. “A gunshot. . . is a holocaust. It’s not a gesture of bravado, it’s death.”

So that was the guy who decided to film Shane: a man whose long-standing admiration for America’s popular conception of the mythic west was now haunted by war. It would be his first (and, as it turned out, his only) western as a director, and he was determined to do the job right, infusing the audience with deep emotions reminiscent of those quiet moments of communion achieved long ago in his parents’ theater.

“What I wanted this film to do,” Stevens said, “was catch something of how people looked and lived, their home ways, their manners and ways of doing things, and most importantly the violent character of the six-shooter. . . I wanted to show that a .45, if you pull directly in a man’s direction, you destroy an upright figure. I wanted to make that one point.” How he went about doing all of that — the directorial decisions, the editing, the clever cinematic tricks — would change the way westerns were made forever after.

Previous posts in the series “Jack Schaefer, George Stevens, and Shane”

Part 1

FURTHER READING and VIEWING

Two books about George Stevens. Giant: George Stevens, a Life on Film by Marilyn Ann Moss and George Stevens: Interviews edited by Paul Cronin (the same guy who did that great book Herzog on Herzog, which I referenced in our Grizzly Man series) are both worthwhile. Unlike guys like John Ford, Stevens enjoyed articulating the decisions underlying his art, and these books are chock full of his thoughts on his films, Hollywood, and much else.

George Stevens: A Filmmaker’s Journey. This excellent, illuminating documentary was produced, directed and narrated by Stevens’ own son, George Jr. You can Netflix it, or purchase it at the usual places. Well worth your time.

Martin Scorsese on George Stevens. The renowned director of our time explains what he admires about one of the greats of the Golden Age of filmmaking in this article written for TCM.

“[John Ford] was the only one of the Hollywood directors who fought who did not forget his men.”

– Captain Mark Armistead, USN –

Thus quotes Joseph McBride in his masterful biography Searching for John Ford, at the head of the chapter dealing with the director’s wartime activities. It is usually seen as lamentable when a genius is pulled from the practice of his art for any extended period, but here we must make a special allowance. As filmmaker Lindsay Anderson (1923-1994) explains in his essential critical volume About John Ford (which, like the McBride book, should be sitting proudly and dog-eared on the bookshelf of every conservative film fan): “War service took Ford away from the making of films for some three years when his powers were at their height. One would regret this interruption more had it not led directly to the making of a masterpiece.”

The masterpiece of which he speaks is a 1945 war film called They Were Expendable, and if you are a conservative who has never seen it, then you have denied yourself one of the most moving and achingly poetic expressions of your worldview ever put to celluloid.

They Were Expendable was made in the Fall of 1944, while most of the people portrayed in the story were still rotting in Japanese POW camps, if indeed they weren’t already dead. Just like our modern foes, the Japanese mocked the Geneva Conventions throughout World War II, and by the end some 40% of the POWs in their care had been executed, starved, or died of disease in their camps. This is compared to Europe, where only 1% of American POWs in German camps died. The events the film depicts took place in early 1942 when, in the wake of Pearl Harbor, tens of thousands of Americans found themselves trapped in the Philippines and facing a fearsome Japanese invasion. The enemy bombed them with impunity, destroying their bases and leaving them with only four planes and an assortment of tiny boats. Supplies and morale dwindled into oblivion as, rather than be evacuated, they were ordered to hold their positions as long as possible against — and eventually be killed or captured by — an overwhelming enemy who was infamous for torturing and murdering prisoners.

How these Americans (and Filipinos) comported themselves as they were gobbled up by the Japanese war machine, buying time with their lives so that General MacArthur could escape the clutches of the enemy and prepare a counter-assault, is the focus of the film. And yet it is like no other war film ever made. Its long running time (two hours, sixteen minutes) allows us to linger on scene after scene of doomed men and women slowly losing their grip on their homes, their jobs, their culture, and each other. Under Ford’s direction, the movie rises above mere plot — battles, strategies — to become something much greater: the cinematic ennobling of an entire people, their way of life, their code of honor, and their selfless sacrifice. Lindsay Anderson would later declare it his single favorite film from his single favorite director, noting the presence of “image after image of conscious dignity” depicting a “love of brotherhood, loyalty,” and “the spirit of endurance that can wring victory from defeat.”

What prompts someone to make a movie like this? To throw away all of the Hollywood clichés, to indeed ignore the enemy entirely (the Japanese are only seen from afar via their planes and ships) and instead reach for something more vital: the very bedrock of our connection with country and culture? It’s so personal a picture that any essay has to be as much about the life and times of its maker as about the film itself — the two are intertwined too deeply to ignore. We thus turn away from They Were Expendable for a spell, and drift backward in time to the life of the director many call the greatest in motion picture history.

For John Ford (1894–1973), serving with the Navy during World War II was much more than boilerplate Hollywood patriotism. He was no green recruit, hastily enlisting in the wake of Pearl Harbor to toss on a uniform for the very first time. Growing up on the coast of Maine where he met many sailors, from an early age he was entranced by the discipline, hard ways, and exaltation of duty inherent in military life. During High School he applied to the U.S. Naval Academy at Annapolis, and was devastated when he failed the entrance exam. In 1918, as a twenty-three-year-old fledgling director in Hollywood, he again tried to serve, this time volunteering as an aerial combat photographer. Bad eyesight ensured he flunked the physical, and numerous attempts to circumvent that ruling came to naught.

Despite these failures, he never gave up, making many military films throughout the ’20s and ’30s and taking every opportunity to schmooze with the Navy brass brought on as technical advisers. Finally, as a forty-year-old in 1934, and despite bad eyes once again causing him to fail the physical, enough strings were pulled by his Navy buddies to get him into the U.S. Naval Reserve. Given the rank of Lieutenant Commander, he was charged with creating “a course in naval photography; its uses, tactical, historical, and propaganda,” studying “infra-red and other super-sensitive films and complimentary filters as to their efficacy on sea and in the air, particularly in tropical waters” and “working intensely in an effort to collect photographic and camouflage information likely to be of value to the Navy.”

He also began spying for the Navy on a semi-formal basis during frequent trips of drunken carousing down the western coast of Mexico on his yacht, the Araner. With friends like John Wayne, Henry Fonda, and Ward Bond in tow, Ford made observations of the coastline and filed detailed reports on Japanese ships and suspicious “sailors” in the area. These made their way to Navy intelligence, netting him several citations.

In 1940, with friends in the military telling him that America’s eventual entry into the war was all but assured, Ford attempted to establish an official Naval photographic unit that could not only use their skills to directly aid the front-line troops in the fight ahead (in the form of reconnaissance, mapping terrain, et cetera) but also help fight the nasty propaganda war that was already brewing between patriotic Americans and growing cells of anti-American Leftists who were becoming increasingly vocal in the media and Hollywood. The proposal he sent to his superiors reads today as if it was clipped from Big Hollywood’s own mission statement:

Radio, newspapers, motion pictures blast contrary ideas back and forth. . . A series of films which show factually the power of the American Navy is bound to give a psychological lift to the whole nation. Let them see the rigors of training; the skill of execution in maneuvers. . . our morale purpose is to show that a Democracy can and must create a greater fighting machine, in spirit and being, than a dictator power.

Unfortunately, Ford was pressing up against a lumbering, asleep-at-the-wheel Navy, the same one that would allow the Japanese to surprise its fleet at Pearl the very next year. With numerous agencies like the Signal Corps protecting their film-making/photographic turf against the interloper, Ford watched his proposals vanish into the gaping maws of military bureaucracy. The sense that namby-pamby Hollywood civilians would have little to contribute to an honest war effort might have played a part as well. As much as Ford liked being a Navy man, the endless red tape and politics were sources of constant aggravation, and he often lashed out at his superiors to a degree that would have landed anyone else in the brig. An oft-told story has it that, when asked by an officer what Hollywood landlubbers liked to do for amusement after making a movie, Ford cheerfully replied, “We all get on a bus and go down to San Diego and f*** Navy wives.”

Undeterred by being ignored, Ford decided to proceed unofficially, confident that someday soon the talent of Hollywood would be called upon, and that he would be ready. He began enlisting men from the rank-and-file of Hollywood film crews — cinematographers, grips, editors. He borrowed prop guns and uniforms from the Fox costume department, and set up impromptu military film classes on unused soundstages. There his Hollywood recruits learned from experts like the Oscar-winning cinematographer Gregg Toland (The Grapes of Wrath, Citizen Kane, et al.) about cameras they would use during a war, how to shoot in all lighting conditions, and how to develop film in the field if need be. They also were drilled in the basics of military life by Jack Pennick, a member of Ford’s regular acting troupe who happened to be an expert on military history and rules.

The rest of Tinseltown, and the skeptical Navy brass, began jokingly referring to this motley crew as “John Ford’s Navy.” And yet, by the time he was through, over a hundred of his Hollywood trainees had joined the active service or reserves, ready for a war they knew was coming.

After Pearl Harbor, with the Navy in shock and disarray, Ford finally found his long-sought benefactor. William “Wild Bill” Donovan was in the process of setting up the OSS — the Office of Strategic Services, the precursor to today’s CIA — and Ford’s moxie, skills, and penchant for skirting the bureaucracy was just what he was looking for. Soon the director had brought his Hollywood gang under the official auspices of the OSS as “The Field Photographic Branch,” and it wasn’t long before they were filming reconnaissance, troop movements, and full-on battles all over the world.

At forty-seven years of age, after three decades of trying, John Ford was finally a soldier.

Ford served without pay, traveling across the globe and dodging enemy bombers and U-Boats to fulfill his duties as head of Field Photo. Iceland… Panama… North Africa… West Africa… Cuba… Australia… Ceylon… China… India…. Burma…. Saudi Arabia… Brazil… France. Ford filmed potential base locations, assessed the security of existing sites, captured now-historic battles on film, often in color, and coordinated the movements and missions of his men, thirteen of whom were killed in action. For these efforts, he was promoted to Captain on April 3, 1944. In later years he would state that — although he was the recipient of many of the highest awards in the film industry, including several Oscars — he was most proud of having earned his Small Arms Expert’s medal in the Navy.

John Ford had a knack for showing up in interesting places. He was on the deck of the USS Hornet, deep in enemy waters, when the famous Doolittle raid lifted off for Japan, his camera recording the historic moment for posterity. He was at Normandy on June 6, 1944, capturing rare footage of D-Day as it unfolded. He first (and last!) parachute jump occurred behind enemy lines in Burma on a secret OSS mission, with Ford terrified and murmuring Hail Marys all the way down because, a mere few days before, he had filmed a cargo drop and watched as chute after chute failed to open and the boxes smashed into the unforgiving earth.

Someone else who was scared was Ford’s wife, Mary, who only saw her husband on several brief occasions during the years he was off to war. She was from a Navy family herself and understood the sacrifices involved, but that didn’t make it any easier. One extant letter has Ford gently chiding her, “Ma, you can’t call up long distance just when you’re blue and lonesome. It’s just too damned expensive. We’ve really got to adjust — not financially necessarily, but mentally.” Lonely and bored, she wrote back to her husband that she felt guilty for not doing anything herself for the war effort while he was away fighting. One stateside friend wrote to Ford that his wife was, “pretty miserable just sitting on a hilltop worrying about you and waiting for you to come home.”

Eventually, Mary found some solace in volunteering her time at the now-legendary Hollywood Canteen, the star-studded entertainment hangout for servicemen passing through Los Angeles, where GIs could be served dinner by movie stars and dance the night away with popular starlets to the tunes of world-famous big bands. Mary threw herself into kitchen work there, and quickly became Vice President of the Canteen’s board. Her letters during this time reveal that she helped stars like Bob Hope and Bette Davis fight off a coven of Hollywood Commies, who were trying to get the military MPs (charged with keeping order in the Canteen) booted out, so they could then begin using the venue for staging and promoting leftist propaganda unimpeded.

Ford’s relationship with his wife wasn’t perfect — he was a notorious alcoholic, and one who had flirted with his share of Hollywood actresses during the early years, most notably Katharine Hepburn. But his wife had closed her ears to the gossip and never wavered from his side, vowing to remain “Mrs. John Ford until I die.” They had been married almost twenty-five years, raised two kids, and had overcome problems that would have doomed a lesser marriage. “I pray to God it will soon be over,” he wrote to her in another letter, “so we can live our life together with our children and grandchildren. . . God bless and love you Mary darling — I’m tough to live with — heaven knows & Hollywood didn’t help — Irish & genius don’t mix well but you know you’re the only woman I’ve ever loved.”

By the end of John Ford’s life, he had been married for fifty-three years.

Next Saturday in For Conservative Movie Lovers, we continue our look at John Ford’s war years, and address his Oscar-winning WWII documentary The Battle of Midway (1942).

FURTHER READING and VIEWING

Searching for John Ford: A Life by Joseph McBride: Without question the bible for John Ford fans. Ford is lucky in that most of the biographies written about him have been pretty good. But McBride’s masterwork — the culmination of three decades of intense research — towers above them all. Heavily drawn upon whenever I write or think about Ford, it is a must-read for all conservative film fans.

John Ford’s Sex Hygiene (1940): A footnote to Ford’s war career, mentioned here solely for the benefit of the morbidly curious. Only for the strong of stomach (and not safe for work). Actor Charles Trowbridge (later to play Admiral Blackwell in They Were Expendable) narrates and stars in this still-ghastly training film, which fully accomplished its goal of scaring the hell out of millions of randy enlisted men. In graphic, venereal diseased detail, young recruits are shown the perils of fooling around with ’dem dirty wemmins in their off-hours. At one point during the production of this little documentary Daryl Zanuck, the head of Twentieth-Century Fox, burst in on Ford interviewing a guy glistening with disgusting sores and declared, “He don’t scare me — send him to makeup!” When asked to comment on the film years later, Ford quipped, “I looked at it and threw up.”

Sex Hygiene Part I at YouTube | Sex Hygiene Part II at YouTube (again, it’s thoroughly gross, and there’s lots of medical full-frontal male nudity — you have been warned.)

The Hollywood Canteen is an idea that could and should be resurrected today, but do you dare take a peek at the modern incarnation of The Hollywood Canteen? One featuring not patriotic movie stars serving our troops, but pampered, puerile celebrities like Paris Hilton and Marilyn Manson being feted by armies of vapid Hollywood wannabes? Steel yourself against massive disappointment and check it out.